Nurture Our Young Athletes

November 16, 1999|By Ernest L. Parker Columnist

A Daily Press article on Nov. 11 mentioned that the Hampton High School Crabbers are ranked No. 5 in the Fox Sports Net Fab 50 football poll and are steadily climbing. Of all the hundreds of thousands of high schools in the nation, our city school namesake is the fifth best.

What a job the coaches, teachers and other staff have done to make this all possible! They will and should be commended for all of their time and effort beyond the call of duty.

But let's remember how these athletes acquired their interest and skills in the game of football itself. There are many high schools throughout the country with even twice the enrollment of Hampton High School that cannot field a decent team because their boys are not interested in even playing.

Leading child analysts agree that a youngster develops his most extensive interest in learning anything between the ages of 6 and 12 years old. This is the age period that these athletes developed the interest, which is just as important as the skills they need to play football.

How did they develop that interest and then the skills to play? They did so through well-organized youth league sports. If you do a survey of most of the successful high school players, you will see that they participated in youth league sports just as outstanding high school musicians, gymnasts and other artists took lessons that helped develop their skills and interest.

If a child's quest for knowledge is not nurtured during the developmental years of 6 to 12, it may be rather difficult to get him or her interested in learning a skill after that. The reason so many large inner-city high schools have difficulty fielding a football team is because there are few, well-organized youth football leagues in those areas. As a result, many of our college and professional athletes are no longer coming from inner cities.

We are fortunate enough to have well-run youth football programs in Hampton and Newport News. As a resident of Hampton and a former youth league coach, I saw several well-run games at Gosnold's Hope Park in Hampton. One of my 12-year-old neighbors was a star, and my assigned Little Brother was an 8-year- old player.

We must give these children and the league more recognition and support if we want our children to stay interested in football. I notice that the older teen-age divisions of the league could not field several teams because not enough boys were interested in signing up.

Nowadays, parents and coaches of disinterested youth are competing with 75 or more TV channels, Playstation and Nintendo. So therefore it is imperative that we give the athletes who do compete more recognition for playing.

It is not enough to give them a little write-up and action picture at the end of the season. Is it too much to ask to have their games televised? We must invest in our children while they are young, and then we would not have to pay so much to get them out of trouble later in their lives.

A large write-up and picture should be in the newspaper every week. It's not enough to only televise tape-delayed high school games twice a week. We need to televise live games, especially during the playoffs. When I visited North Carolina this was being done several years ago.

Let us stop taking the success of the Crabbers for granted. They are giving our former All-American City of Hampton national recognition that even real estate agents use to sell houses.

As a former juvenile probation officer for many years in Philadelphia and Bridgeport, Conn., I had thousands of boys on my caseloads. I never remember one of them ever being on an organized youth athletic team.

Parker, of Hampton, is retired. He formerly was a professor at Hampton University.